Yeah, funding for creator-focused startups is drying up

Services that help folks make, share and profit from creative works — Maven to Bounty to Substack to Patreon to Canva — have proliferated and grown in recent years. The rise of creator-focused startups was not an accident; instead, a secular trend of more accessible software for more diverse areas of creative work was met … Read more

Advocacy groups slam Amazon and MGM’s controversial ‘Ring Nation’ show ahead of its premiere

Making its television premiere tonight, “Ring Nation” is debuting amid calls from advocacy groups to cancel the show. MGM (now owned by Amazon) is leveraging footage from Ring security cameras (also owned by Amazon) to create a show along the lines of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” with Wanda Sykes as host. The show is a … Read more

iFixit teardown looks at the guts of the Apple Watch Ultra

iFixit’s video details the inner workings of Apple’s new premium watch. | Image: iFixit The right-to-repair enthusiasts at iFixit have published a video providing a screw-by-screw breakdown of the Apple Watch Ultra. The entire video serves less as a review of the capabilities of the Ultra and more of an intimate examination of the tech … Read more

How Twitch lost the battle for its soul

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge The news that Twitch will be reducing top streamers’ revenue share from 70 / 30 to 50 / 50 signals that the platform is no longer the ‘creator first’ entity that made it so popular. Continue reading…

If you still miss Google Reader, Substack has a new web-based RSS client

Image: Substack Substack’s the latest company trying to resurrect Google Reader from the dead — well, in spirit at least. Nearly a decade after Google’s popular RSS feed aggregator shut down, Substack has launched a desktop RSS client alternative: Substack Reader for the web. Now, users can organize all of their Substack subscriptions in one … Read more